stank
UK/stæŋk/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
British/staŋk/
stank is the simple past of stink.
Verb (1)
stank (third-person singular simple present stanks, present participle stanking, simple past and past participle stanked)
- To stink; to smell bad.
- I just ignored him because he stanked worst than I did.2010, Michael Lee, Time to Crime: Doing Time, Listening to Crime, page 39
- I did not want to ask for her hand in marriage in a hospital room that stanked of chlorine and god knew what else.2012, Tess Neis, My Own Winter Sun, page 234
- To cause to smell bad.
- He was killing me with the jokes and he was killing everybody with his smuggled corned beef samages that stanked up the joint.2010, Brooke, Detroit, Lenacrave and Cleveland, page 295
Noun (3)
stank (plural stanks)
- Water retained by an embankment; a pool of water.
- And he [the hart] fleeth then mightily and far from the hounds, that is to say he hath gone a great way from them, then he will go into the stank, and will soil therein once or twice in all the stank and then he will come out again by the same way that he went in, and then he shall ruse again the...c. 1425, Edward, Second Duke of York [i.e., Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York], “Of the Hart and His Nature”, in W[illia]m A[dolf] Baillie-Grohman, F[lorence] Baillie-Grohman, editors, The Master...
- A dam or mound to stop water.
Verb (2)
stank (third-person singular simple present stanks, present participle stanking, simple past and past participle stanked)
- To dam up; to block the flow of water or other liquid.
- Water-courses are stanked where they take a sharp turn, to prevent the force of the current wearing away the bank at the outside angle.1881, John Edwin Cussans, History of Hertfordshire - Volume 3, page 321
- 'Have you ever seen such a mighty river before?' 'No , I answered, 'but I knew him when he was a wee thing, a child like myself, and I have stanked him often at his sylvan source with a few small stones, and the very first vessel he ever floated was a little boat I made of a pea-pod.'1881, Zacharias Topelius, Whisperings in the wood, page 92
- To pack in tightly.
- They never dreamed of using a float; I doubt if there was such a thing in the whole valley; but they “stanked' their rods in the bank, with the line heavily shotted and arranged so that the hook was just clear of the bottom, the line being at right angles to the point of the rod.1895, G. Christopher Davies, “The Dee”, in The Badminton Magazine of Sports & Pastimes, volume 1, page 251
- Should the depth of water on a vessel's deck be considered too deep for this method, the ship has to be stanked, or raised upon–that is to say, balks of timber have to be bolted or secured to her waterways; thick planks have to be fastened to the balks, so that they come above water, and then they...1898, Captain James Bell, “Raising Sunken Vessels”, in Cassier's Magazine: An Engineering Monthly, volume 14, page 331
- To seal off an area of the mine in which a fire has started.
- The writer was obliged, a few months ago, to open out a whole district which had been "stanked off " ( as the phrase of the district is ) for over a year, and on approaching the old air-way the heat became intolerable and the fire was burning as badly as ever.1884, North of England Institute of Mining Engineers, Transactions - Volume 33, page 155
- From your experience then, taking into account the fact that you have a fiery and dusty mine to deal with, would you prefer to stank off as soon as there is the slightest evidence of any natural heating, either by smell or vapour or anything else, or would you prefer to run the risk of having to...1916, Great Britain. Home Office, First Report of the Departmental Committee on Spontaneous Combustion of Coal in Mines, page 176
Verb (4)
stank (third-person singular simple present stanks, present participle stanking, simple past and past participle stanked)
- To trample.
- In the por ( bustle ) I lost my hat ; tell gittin ' cloase to a mait-stannin ' (shambles), to saave myself from bein' stanked ( trampled ) under fut, I got up and set down 'pon the stannin' ; an ' then, aw, I feelt my sawl all a-fire weth love for everybody theere, and sprengin' to my feet, I begun...1873, Richard Hampton, Foolish Dick: an Autobiography of Richard Hampton, page 43
- And then she took down the cloam from the chimbly and stanked it under her feet, so as no one shouldn't hev it after she war gone.1898, M, “Recollections of a Parish Worker”, in The Cornish Magazine, volume 1, page 471
- To stumble or lurch.
- I put on my clean gook to-day, And went to fetch some barm,When I stanked 'pon a slaw-cripple, Down there by Hodge's farm.1895, Joseph Thomas, Randigal Rhymes and a Glossary of Cornish Words, page 24
- But she stanked upon a wuilkin one day in the chall, and after that she was always liable to quames.1901, Pearson's Magazine, volume 11, page 362
Meaning of stink
Verb
stink (third-person singular simple present stinks, present participle stinking, simple past stank or stunk, past participle stunk)
- To have a strong bad smell.
- To be greatly inferior; to perform badly.
- That movie stinks. I didn't even stay for the end.
- To give an impression of dishonesty, untruth, or sin.
- Something stinks about the politician's excuses.
- Synonyms:
- be fishy
- To cause to stink; to affect by a stink.
Adjective (1)
stank (not comparable)
- Foul-smelling, stinking, unclean.
- Fishy, pussy funky elevator
Pissy, broke ass project elevator
Old baby piss, stank ass horse, cat piss smelling funky hot ass elevator
I'm not climbing no 17 flights[…]2002, Tasha C. Miller, Assout: Incoherent Thoughts and Poems of an Unemployed Black Girl, page 11 - This is why most top-notch women can't stand stank hoes. Classy women have more contempt for these women than men do.2003, Tariq Nasheed, Play or be played, page 124
- Fishy, pussy funky elevator
Noun (1)
stank (plural stanks)
- A stink; a foul smell.
Noun (2)
stank (uncountable)
- A certain quality, especially to jazz music, which is often desirable and can be achieved by, among other things, crunchy harmonies, blue notes and groovy rhythm
- Synonyms:
- stankiness
Adjective (2)
stank (comparative more stank, superlative most stank)
Verb (3)
stank (third-person singular simple present stanks, present participle stanking, simple past and past participle stanked)
- To surround or guard.
- This was executed with sch gallantry and spirit by the troops, that, notwithstanding the natural strength of this pos, the abbatis of fruit trees that were made, the batteries of the town of Bommel which stanked the approach, and the considerable number of men who defended it, it was soon carried...1796, The Scottish Register, page 252
- upon the south of the garden, by ane easy descent, you come to the great orch-yaird containing sex aikers of ground, includeing a parcell thereof that is woody, all upon one levine, stanked and hedged, about whose back entry from the south leads you first to a triangle haugh surrounded with wood...1815, James Somerville Baron Somerville, Walter Scott, Memorie of the Somervilles, page 384
Verb (5)
stank (third-person singular simple present stanks, present participle stanking, simple past and past participle stanked)
- To cause (the udders) to become blocked and inflamed from lack of milking.
- In cattle auctions, cows are frequently seen with “stanked udders,” when a cow is driven to market several miles along hard roads with a loaded udder, its milk is not improved for human consumption.1913, Royal Sanitary Institute (Great Britain), Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute - Volume 33, page 86
- An old cow, giving rather little milk and perhaps not freshly calved, may be 'stanked' in order to deceive a prospective purchaser, and in this case an accusation of 'cruelty' would not be so ill-founded.1950, Frederick Daniel Smith, Barbara Wilcox, The Country Companion, page 91
Proper noun capitalized: Stank
Stank
- A hamlet east of Barrow-in-Furness in Barrow parish, Westmorland and Furness, Cumbria, England, previously in Barrow-in-Furness district (OS grid ref SD2370).
Synonyms of stank
Forms of stank
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | stanks |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | stanks |
| present participle | stanking |
| past participle | stanked |
| past | stanked |
Origin of stank
See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.
Respelling of stink, representing the thank-think merger. Compare thang.
From Old French estanc, (French étang), from Latin stagnum (“a pool”). Compare stagnant, stagnate.
Words formed from stank
Phrases with stank
- stank up
- stank out
- stank eyes
- stank hens
- stank on ice
- stank like a polecat
- stank to high heaven
- stank like a mackerel
- stank a dog off a gut wagon
- Winton, Stank and Hallikeld
- stank a skunk off a gut wagon
- stank a buzzard off a gut wagon
2 more phrasesFewer phrases
Words that rhyme with stank
Questions about stank
- What does stank mean?
- Stank means foul-smelling, stinking, unclean.
- What is stank the simple past of?
- Stank is the simple past of stink.
- What part of speech is stank?
- Stank can be an adjective, a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce stank?
- Stank is pronounced /stæŋk/ (UK).
Words near stank in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: stank (page history and authors); Stank (page history and authors); stink (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Pvanp7-stank.wav.
Cite this entry: “stank.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stank. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.